Selected letters of Mendelssohn/Letter 12
TO HIS FAMILY.
It is a delightful feeling to wake in the morning with a long allegro to instrument with any number of hautboys and trumpets, and with the brightest of weather outside as well, promising a long stretch in the fresh country for the afternoon. I have been like this for an entire week, and the friendliness of Munich, as I felt it the first time, is now more apparent than ever. I scarcely know any place where I feel so much at home, so much a regular, a burgher of the city, as I do here. It is so charming to be among absolutely cheerful faces, and to look cheerful oneself in company, and then to know everybody in the streets besides. Now I have my concert before me, which is a handful, not to mention the friends who break in on me at every moment, nor the lovely weather which entices one out of doors, nor the copyists who compel one to stay at home—it is all a most pleasurable and most stormy existence. My concert has had to be put off on account of the October festival, which begins on Sunday and lasts all the week. There is the theatre and a ball every evening, no chance of an orchestra or a hall to play in.
So on Monday the 17th, about half-past six in the evening, think of me and the thirty fiddlers and the wind instruments striking up. The C minor symphony starts the first part, the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” the second. The first closes with my new piece in G minor. Then, alas! at the close of the second I have to improvise, a thing you will believe I don’t look forward to, but these people insist on it. Bärmann has decided to play again; Breiting, the Vials, Loehle, Beyer, and Pellegrini are the singers and share the part-music. The place will be the Odeon, and the proceeds go to the Munich charities.
Every morning I have to write and correct and instrument in preparation for the great event; then comes one o’clock, and I depart for Scheidel’s coffee-house in the Kausingergasse, where I know all the faces already by heart, and find their owners every day in precisely the same positions, two playing chess, three looking on, five reading the newspapers, six dining, and myself the seventh. After dinner Bärmann generally comes and carries me off. We talk about concert business, or else go for a walk to a beer and coffee-house, then back home and to work again. For the evenings I have rigorously refused all invitations, but there are so many delightful houses where I can walk in uninvited that I am seldom in my study after eight. The place I live in is a room flush with the ground, which was formerly a shop, so that everybody who passes looks in and says good morning. Near me there lives a Greek, who is learning the piano; he is abominable, but my landlord’s daughter, who is very slender and wears a silver band to keep her curls in order, is all the more charming by comparison. Three days in the week I have music at four o’clock, to wit, Bärmann, Breiting, Standacher, young Poissl, and various others come in, and we hold a sort of musical picnic. In this way I come to know operas which, to my discredit, I have neither heard nor seen before, as “Lodoiska,” “Faniska,” “Medea;” also “Preciosa,” “Abu Hassan,” etc.—the scores being lent us from the theatre. But on Wednesday evening we had a great joke. We had lost several wagers which we were all supposed to share in, so after many proposals we at last resolved to hold a musical soirée in my room, and invite all our Creditors. This brought up the list to about thirty persons; divers came uninvited and had themselves presented to us. There was a woeful lack of space; we had to put several on my bed, and a flock of patient sheep were conducted into my little room. The affair was incredibly lively and a great success. E. also was there, sweet as never was, melting with admiration and poetic fervour, and grey stockings, in short infinitely tedious. First I played my old quartette in E flat minor, then Breiting sang “Adelaide,” then Herr S. played variations on the violin—with many apologies. Bärmann played Beethoven’s first quartette (F major), which he had arranged for two clarinets, basset-horn, and bassoon; then came an air from Euryanthe, furiously demanded over again da capo, and for a finale I had to improvise—would not—but the uproar became so violent that I had to set to it against my will, though I had nothing in my mind but wine glasses, chairs, and cold meat. Close at hand, just by my landlord and his family, sat the Cornelius girls; the Schauroths were making a call on the first floor with the same object; inside there was a crowd, and outside in the street another. What with the heat in the room, the uproarious noise, the very various guests scattered about confusedly, and, at last, refreshments and drinkables, the whole thing became perfectly insane, all manner of sentiments and health were drunk with acclamation, while the people of quality sat in the middle of the swarm and held themselves erect with severe countenances. It was half-past one before we broke up. Next evening was the antipodes of all that. I had to play before the Queen and Court. It was all very proper and dressed up and polished; one’s elbow continually ran against an “Excellency.” The finest flattering speeches flew about the room, and there was I, the roturier, with my citizen-like good-fellowship and my last night’s headache. I got out of it, however, somehow, not without having to improvise on a theme set by royalty, and getting much applauded. The most charming thing was the Queen remarking that I really carried one away, so that one could think of nothing else during my music, and after that I prayed to be excused.
Such, you see, are my days at Munich. But I have forgotten that every day at twelve I have been giving little[1] L. a lesson in double counterpoint and four-part composition, and so on, which makes me think again how confused and stupid most teachers and most books are on these points, and how clear the whole thing is when one presents it clearly.
She is a delightful vision to me. Imagine a delicate little pale maiden with noble, though not beautiful, features, so interesting and rare that it is hard to look away from her, and with all her movements and words full of a sort of geniality. She has the gift of composing songs and then singing them in a way I have never heard the like of; it is the most complete musical delight that ever yet fell to my lot. When she sits down at the piano and begins one of these songs of hers, the notes acquire a strange, new tone; all the music seems wonderfully swayed hither and thither, and in every note there is the finest and profoundest feeling. Then, when she sings the first bar in her tender voice, every hearer grows perfectly still and wrapt, and each in his own fashion feels himself penetrated through and through. I wish you could only hear her voice! It is so innocently and unconsciously beautiful; it comes from her inmost heart, and yet is so tranquil! Last year all this was perfectly recognisable. In every song she had written her talent was as clear as noonday, yet Marx and I sounded the tocsin about her among all the musicians here, and no man heeded us. But since then she has made a very remarkable advance. Anyone whom her present songs do not touch must be utterly insensible. So, unfortunately, it has become the fashion to ask the little maid for songs, to take the lights away from the piano when she sings, and to be interested in her melancholy. It is an unpleasant contrast; sometimes when I have been wanted to play something after her, I could not bring myself to it, and let the people go away. Very possibly all this talk will spoil her, for she has no friend to understand or direct her. Besides, she is curiously without musical training, knows little, can scarcely discriminate good music from bad, and, left to herself, thinks everything outside her own songs wonderfully fine. If she once comes to an understanding with herself, it will go well. Meanwhile I have done all I can, that is, most earnestly entreated her parents and herself to avoid soirées and so forth, and not to let anything so divine be wasted. Heaven grant my advice may do some good. Perhaps I may send you some of her songs, things she wrote for me out of gratitude for my teaching her what she already knew naturally, and because I have done a little to attach her to good and serious music.
Besides this, I play the organ for an hour every day; but, unluckily, I can’t get the practice I want, because the pedals are without the five high notes, so that one can’t play a single passage of Seb. Bach’s with it. But there are marvellously fine stops in it, with which one can embellish chorales; and especially, my Fanny, I have found the stops which are wanted for Bach’s “Schmücke dich o liebe Seele.” They seem made for the purpose, and the tone is so thrilling that a kind of shudder runs all through me when I begin. For the florid accompaniment I have an eight-foot flute, and a perfectly soft four-foot, which continues floating above the chorale itself. That you remember in Berlin. But there is one row of keys that has nothing but reed-stops, and of these I use a soft oboe, a clarion, very light, a four-foot, and a viola. That brings out the chorale so quick and penetrating; it sounds like human voices, full of emotion, singing in the distance.
Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, when you will be in possession of this letter, I shall be in the Theresien Park with eighty thousand others. Think of me there, and be good enough to be well, and remain so.
- ↑ Fräulein Lang.